Norma Collins of Baldwin wrote in to tell us about the trips she would take into the woods with her maternal grandparents every Christmas to find a tree. But instead of a large, hulking cypress, the family always looked for “a small, frail cedar and bring it back to be decorated with paper ornaments, strings of popcorn and paper chains (no lights — it was a fire hazard, you know).”

Her paternal grandparents lived next door in Jefferson, and she told us about finding trees with her Papa Boyd, too.

“Papa Boyd would wait till two or three days before Christmas and walk a mile or so to Kesler’s Market and bring home the smallest, saddest looking tree there,” she wrote. “He’d call and tell me to come help him trim the tree. When I’d get there he’d have this shoe box that contained one string of lights, five or six old glass ball ornaments, icicles he’d used for several years and a strand of foil tinsel that had broken and been retied over the years. I would try to wrap that string of lights around the tree but finally give up and string them diagonally down through the frontside.

“The little tree was always pitiful in some shape or form.”

But because of that tradition, Collins said she and her daughter always wait until the last few days before Christmas to get their own little misshapen tree.

She also wrote a poem about her Papa Boyd’s tree, in honor of our sad saps.